The Idea of Identity is Caused by the Resemblance of Perceptions

Our idea of the personal identity which produces thought or imagination can be explained by our idea on the personal identity of plants and animals.

There is a great analogy between:

• the personal identity of plants and animals which produces thought or imagination, and
• the personal identity of a person.

We have a distinct idea of an object that remains unchanged through time.

• We call this idea ‘identity’ or ‘sameness’.

We also have a distinct idea of several related objects existing in succession.

• This gives us a perfect a notion of ‘diversity’, as if those objects were not related.

These two ideas of ‘sameness’ and ‘diversity’ are perfectly distinct and even contrary.

• Yet in our common way of thinking, they are confounded with each other.

The action of the mind that comes up with the idea of sameness and the idea of diversity feels almost the same.

• The effort required in both is the same.

But the similarity of the successive objects in our idea of diversity makes us consider it as one continued object.

• This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake.

It makes us replace the diversity of objects with the notion of identity.

We might properly think of the object as different for a split second.

But in the next moment, we always assign an identity to that object.

Our propensity to this mistake is so great.

• We fall into it before we are aware.

We incessantly correct ourselves by reflection and return to a more accurate method of thinking.

• Yet we cannot sustain our philosophy for long, or take off this bias from the imagination.

Our last resource is to yield to it.

• We boldly assert that these diverse but related objects are the same.

In order to justify this absurdity to ourselves, we often feign some new and unintelligible principle that:

• connects the objects together, and
• prevents their interruption or variation.

Thus, we feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption.

We run into the notion of a soul, self, and substance to disguise the variation.

If we did not do so, our propension to confound identity with relation would be so great.

We would imagine* something unknown and mysterious, connecting the parts, beside their relation.

This is the case with the identity that we ascribe to plants. Even when this does not take place, we still feel a propensity to confound these ideas, even if we:

• are not able fully to satisfy ourselves in that, nor
• can we find anything invariable and uninterrupted to justify our notion of identity.

When we improperly ascribe ‘identity’ to diverse objects, our mistake is not confined to the idea of identity.

It is commonly attended with a fiction of something:

• invariable and uninterrupted, or
• mysterious and inexplicable, or
• at least with a propensity to such fictions.

This hypothesis is proven by showing from daily experience that diverse objects which continue the same, are only those that have parts successively connected by resemblance, contiguity, or causation.

When our minds perceive such a succession in objects, we assign it a notion of diversity.

• We only ascribe identity to it by mistake.

The relation of the parts of the object which leads us into this mistake, is merely a quality which makes our minds easily easy transition from one to another.

The error arises only because of the resemblance which this act of the mind on thinking about a noncontinuous object bears to the act of the mind thinking about a continuous object.

Our chief business then is to prove that all objects that we think as having an identity, are objects that have a succession of related objects, without observing their lack of change and lack of continuity.